July 2009 Archives

The California Legislature will adopt a 2009-2010 fiscal year budget on Thursday.

It will be a budget that commits the California to regressive principles of taxation that will further undermine the state’s declining middle class. It will be a budget that enshrines denial of service as a principle of California governance. It will be a cowardly budget that will drain about $4.4 billion from cities and counties that are struggling themselves. It will be a budget that mocks President Obama’s efforts at economic stimulus. It will be a budget that kicks the state’s fiscal problems down the road – and into a pothole.

Characteristically, the budget will represent the worst aspects of an ungovernable state. There will be no genuine public scrutiny of the terms of the deal in advance of a cynical up-or-down vote. There will only be disgust.

More

40 years ago, three superbly prepared men, all with careers in the United States military, readied themselves to go the moon and to land two of them there.

Many more military men that year readied themselves to lead boys into the rice paddies and jungles of Vietnam. They led them heroically, ineptly, bravely, heartbreakingly, pointlessly. All of them were less prepared.

The technology that would carry the three astronauts successfully to the moon and back – the Saturn multi-stage rocket, the command module, and the lunar lander – were remarkable examples of American creativity. And they were stunt technologies that had cost billions to develop but which were pointless as hardware for military or commercial applications.

[Update: Tom Wolfe in the NY Times riffs on these themes in an op-ed piece]

More

The news from Orange County isn’t good.

John Hipp, an associate professor of criminology, law and society at UC Irvine, recently summed up the economic and demographic shifts in Orange County through 2006. He found:

 The population grew by a multiplier of 20 in past 60 years and doubled in the past 40.

 Median home values in Orange County have been in the top 1% of all counties nationally since 1970.

 The median household income is still about 50% higher than the average county nationally.

 Nearly one-third of residents have at least a bachelor’s degree, which is about twice the rate of college graduates in the average county.

More

When I was a kid, although I was surrounded by square miles of tract houses, tumbleweeds would appear on my street. In the fall, with a late Santa Ana wind, blown from the DWP right-of-way in Bellflower or from a decrepit feed lot in Dairy Valley (soon to be renamed Cerritos).

The West as a cliché rolled in, fetched up against a chainlink front yard fence, skittered across the parkway strip along South Street, and moved on.

You expected to hear the Sons of the Pioneers singing, in mournful three-part harmony, of being lonely but free, drifting along with the tumbling tumbleweeds.

More

According to a recent impact report prepared for the University of Southern California, USC generated about $2.1 million in direct economic activity in 2008. If conventional multipliers are added in, USC spun off nearly $5 billion in economic benefits to the city, the county, and the region through wages, capital construction, operating expenditures, and the estimated half-billion dollars that USC students spend each year.

That’s really big.

USC also is the biggest private-sector employer in Los Angeles County, with just under 27,000 employees. Most of those jobs are for non-academic workers; most of them live in the ZIP Codes of the central and southern neighborhoods of the city. USC is a mainstay of blue-collar L.A.

More

Is it only my distorted memory, but isn’t Antonio Villaraigosa at the beginning of his first term as mayor, not his second? His previous four years – full of incident and ceaseless bustle – were diverting. They were even productive in part. But those four years seem in retrospect – even to Mayor Villaraigosa – to have been about something other than Los Angeles or its future.

But now it’s “deadlines over headlines” the mayor said on Wednesday, although that seemed bleakly term-limited for day one of a new term.

"I stand renewed and reinvigorated,” he added later. “Above all, I stand determined to finish what we started, determined to find a second wind in our second term," and sounding a little like the pitchman for an ED preparation.

More